A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  Since Turney-High had on his opening page demoted most of his fellow anthropologists to an intellectual level below that of non-commissioned officers, it is scarcely surprising that they repaid him by ignoring his book altogether. David Rapaport, the political scientist who wrote the foreword to the second edition (1971), explained their response as a ‘ “disciplined incapacity” to recognise original work’.26 But the explanation was much simpler. They knew when they were being insulted and collectively turned their backs on the name-caller. That might be a reasoned response were his book to appear today. Turney-High is an unreformed Clausewitzian, whose test of a society’s military standing is whether it practises a form of war that leads to victory: territorial conquest and disarming of the enemy. Clausewitzian victory in the nuclear age (Turney-High wrote before the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb) has come to seem, even to the least sentimental of strategic analysts, a very dubious aim, and it is doubtful whether many of them would embrace the concept of ‘civilised war’ in the spirit that Turney-High offered it forty years ago. Nevertheless, in his own time he put his profession on the spot. He had demanded that it think how warmaking transformed the stateless societies it loved so well into the states that paid the expenses of its field trips, and he would brook no refusal to answer.

  An answer did come — in time. The pressure of external events forced anthropologists to look at their primitives as warriors and not exclusively as gift-givers or myth-makers. The pressure was felt most strongly in the United States not simply because it was a principal nuclear power and a leading combatant in Vietnam but because it had become in the years after 1945 the heartland of anthropology. Ethnographic fieldwork, in its increasingly scientific guise, is enormously expensive and it was to the rich American universities that most scholars had to look for funds. To such scholars, moreover, whose mission was to probe the deepest and oldest secrets of human behaviour, the students at the American universities, where opposition to the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War was strongest, began to pose the eternal questions: What makes man fight? Is man naturally aggressive? Have there been societies without war? Do any still exist? Can a modern society embrace perpetual peace and, if not, why?

  Only five articles on the anthropology of war had appeared in learned journals in the 1950s.27 From the 1960s onward they appeared thick and fast. In 1964 the veteran Margaret Mead issued a rallying-cry for Cultural Determinism in an article entitled ‘Warfare is only an invention’.28 A new generation of anthropologists did not think that it could be that simple. New theories had impinged on their subject. Mathematical games theory was one, which allotted numerical values to possible choices in any given conflict of interests and proposed that the ‘strategy’ accumulating the highest total would prove the most successful. Games theory operated at an unconscious level, its proponents insisted, so that it was not necessary for humans to know that they were playing a game for it to be carried on; the survival of those who made the larger number of correct choices was the ‘pay-off’.29 This was merely an attempt to put Darwinian natural selection on to a quantitative footing; because of its intellectual ingenuity, nevertheless, it attracted supporters. Others became involved in the developing discipline of ecology, the study of the relationship between a population and its habitat; young anthropologists quickly saw that certain ecological concepts, such as carrying capacity, which limits population in a given region to that which its consumables will support, could be of great value to them. Consumption implies population growth, population growth leads to competition, competition provokes conflict and so on. Was competition itself the cause of war? Or was war, through its ‘function’ of reducing population or displacing the defeated from the conflict zone, a cause in and of itself?

  This dance along the well worn paths of ‘origins’ and ‘functions’ might have continued for a long time. What changed its pace and direction were two things. First, the American Anthropological Association devoted a symposium at its 1967 meeting to warfare at which, eighteen years after he had proposed it, Turney-High’s distinction between ‘primitive’ war and ‘true’ or ‘civilised’ or, as it was now to be known, ‘modern’ war was at last accepted.30 The second was that from the 1960s onward a group of anthropologists who had tacitly accepted the validity of Turney-High’s insight and had gone to look at primitive warriors through his eyes returned from their field expeditions and began to write up their findings. They did not, of course, agree about how to explain what they had seen. Nevertheless, they had undoubtedly studied warriors who used primitive weapons and it was with primitive weapons — spear, club, arrow — that war had certainly first been fought. It was open to argument whether such weapons had been simple wooden artefacts, or had been tipped with bone or stone, or whether fighting between humans in any style recognisable as warfare had had to await the development of metallurgy. Not even the most dedicated opponent of the idea that technology determines the nature of humanity’s social forms could deny, however, that spear and club, and even bow and arrow, limit the harm that humans can do to each other in combat, particularly by limiting the range at which harm can be done. The warfare of contemporary people who still used spears, clubs and arrows to fight provided, therefore, at the very least some insight into the nature of early combat. Combat is the heart of warfare, the act by which men are maimed or killed in numbers, the activity that divides war from mere hostility, the source of the moral crux — is man good or bad? Does he choose war or is it chosen for him? The young anthropologists who had set off to answer Turney-High’s key question, ‘How does this group fight?’ had also produced the first solid observations of the nature of combat with primitive weapons and, in that respect at least, some insight into how war might have begun. This is the point to look at what they reported. The case-studies chosen have been arranged in developmental progression, the most primitive forms of warfare first.

  SOME PRIMITIVE PEOPLES AND THEIR WARFARE

  The Yanomamö

  The Yanomamö, a people of some 10,000 souls, live in an area of dense tropical forest some 40,000 square miles in extent, on the headwaters of the Orinoco River, straddling the borders of Brazil and Venezuela. When Napoleon Chagnon spent sixteen months there in 1964, he was one of the first outsiders to have made contact with them, while they had as yet received almost no artefacts from the modern world. The Yanomamö are swidden (slash-and-burn) agriculturalists, who hack out temporary gardens from the forest, grow plantains and make new clearings when soil fertility falls. Their villages, holding groups of 40–250 closely related people, are set up about a day’s march from each other, though at a greater distance when enemies are neighbours, and hostilities, which are frequent, often cause moves. A typical move is by a small village away from a larger, hostile one toward a strong, allied village.

  The Yanomamö have been called ‘the fierce people’, and their behaviour is, indeed, extremely ferocious; they have a code of ferocity (waiteri) by which individual men demonstrate their aggressiveness, while whole villages also seek to convince others of the dangers of attacking them. Boys are encouraged to be violent from an early age, by taking part in fierce games, and grow up to be very violent to women. Though women are the principal prizes in exchange and fights, the men who possess them treat them badly. They are beaten, burnt or even shot with arrows when a man gets into a rage, the rage itself often being staged to demonstrate waiteri; wives can hope for protection only if they have brothers in the village whose reputation for fierceness is greater than that of their tormentors.

  Despite waiteri, the event in the Yanomamö year to which villages look forward is the season of inter-village feasting. During the wet season the villagers tend their gardens; when the dry season comes they prepare to feast with a neighbouring village or to be feasted. Trade provides the basis of trust, such as it is, in which agreement to feast originates; though the Yanomamö’s material culture is crude in the extreme — they make little more than hammocks, clay pots, arrows an
d baskets — not all villages make the same things and they depend on others to make up the deficiencies. Successful feasting may then lead on to the most important form of exchange, that of women.

  Exchange of women, though it palliates the ferocity that both individual Yanomamö and their villages display to each other, does not obviate outbreaks of violence. Men constantly seek to seduce the wives of others, which makes for violence within a village, perhaps causing a village group to leave and set up on its own as a separate and now hostile village. A large village in a woman-exchange relationship with a smaller one may demand an unfair ratio. Or a given woman who has been too brutally treated by her husband may be reclaimed by a relative from her original village.

  It is in circumstances like these that the ‘fierce people’ become violent and Yanomamö violence commonly takes a stylised form. It is a widely held belief that combat among primitive peoples is largely ritual but, while there is much to that view, it needs careful qualification. Nevertheless, the practice of violence among the Yanomamö does tend to escalate through carefully graded stages, the levels being the chest-pounding duel, the club fight, the spear fight and the inter-village raid.

  Chest-pounding duels, which usually take place at the inter-village feasts, ‘are always conducted between members of different villages and arise over accusations of cowardice or in response to excessive demands for trade goods, food or women’.31 The procedure is unvarying: after the feasters have taken hallucinogenic drugs, to foster a fighting mood, a man steps forward and thrusts out his chest. A representative of the other village who accepts his challenge steps forward, seizes him and hits him a violent blow in the chest. The recipient of the blow usually does not respond, since he wants to demonstrate his toughness, and may receive as many as four blows before demanding his turn. The exchange goes on blow for blow, until one party is disabled or both are too sore to continue, in which case they may continue with a side-slapping duel, which normally ends quickly when the loser is winded. In the aftermath, if the duel was prearranged, the contestants cradle and chant to each other, swearing eternal friendship.

  Club fights, which are usually spontaneous, are nastier but still ritualised. ‘These usually result from adultery or suspicion of adultery.’32 The plaintiff, bearing a ten-foot pole, goes to the centre of the village — which may be his own — and shouts insults at the offender. If his challenge is accepted, he plants his pole in the ground, leans on it and awaits a blow on the head. Once delivered, it is his turn to respond. The sight of blood, quickly drawn, turns the fight into a free-for-all, with men picking sides and wielding clubs. There is then the real danger of wounding or death, since the challenger’s club has a sharpened end — the sign that he meant business — and someone may be run through. At this stage it is the village headman’s role to intervene with his bow, threatening to shoot an arrow into anyone who will not stop. Fatal wounds are sometimes inflicted, however, which means that the culpable party must fly the village to another, or, if the fight was between villages, that the attackers will retreat. The consequence, however, is a war of raiding in either case.

  Chagnon considers that raiding constitutes Yanomamö ‘war’ but describes a stage intermediate between that and the chest-pounding duel, the spear fight, of which there was only one incident while he was in the field. A small village, defeated in a club fight over a woman — her headman brother took her back from a husband who treated her too badly — allied itself with some others and made a concerted sortie. They succeeded in driving the inhabitants of the larger village out of their homes under ‘a hail of spears’ and chased them as they fled. The large village re-formed, the attackers turned tail and a second spear fight took place some miles farther away. Both sides then retired ‘after nearly losing their tempers’. Several men had been wounded and one subsequently died.

  Both villages later raided each other, but Chagnon regards the raid rather than the spear fight as the more warlike activity, on the grounds that Yanomamö who set out on a raid do so with the intention of killing, and do not much mind how, even in some circumstances whom, they kill. Typically they lie in wait outside the target village until they find a defenceless victim — someone bathing, fetching drinking water or relieving himself — kill him and then fly. Flight is well organised, through a chain of rearguards, and necessarily so, for one raid provokes another. The raiding pattern may lead to what Chagnon considers the ultimately hostile act, a treacherous feast, when a warring village prevails on a third village to invite its enemies to a feast and then surprises them. As many as possible are killed and the widows distributed among the victors.

  Chagnon interprets the Yanomamö style of fighting as a cultural response to their surroundings. It is, he says, absolutely not designed to secure territory, since villages never appropriate the habitat of a defeated neighbour; the point, rather, is to emphasise what he calls ‘sovereignty’, measured by a village’s ability to prevent another taking its women or to establish its right to acquire women on favourable terms. Hence the displays of ‘fierceness’, which are intended to deter seducers, wife-stealers or raiders at the start.

  The Yanomamö behave differently against their non-Yanomamö neighbours, however, and have in recent years expanded successfully into new territory and almost exterminated one tribe. Such genuine fierceness toward others derives from the Yanomamö’s belief that ‘they were the first, finest and most refined form of man to inhabit the earth’ and that all other peoples are a degeneration from their pure stock.33 The ‘enemy’ are in general those not related by marriage, for the Yanomamö, though collectors of women if ‘fierce’ enough, observe kinship rules designed to avoid incest. Kinship is not, however, so strong a force as to prevent warfare between related groups, who fight frequently. What makes them do so, Chagnon suggests, is the practice of female infanticide, common among primitives but followed by the Yanomamö to maximise the number of ‘fierce’ males in the endless rondo of women-taking.

  Since his first visits to the Yanomamö, Chagnon has altered his view of the function of their warfare, and now inclines to see it, in neo-Darwinian terms, as ‘selected for reproductive success’: more killing brings more women and so more offspring.34 Objectively, however, there seems something for all theorists in his account. Warfare undoubtedly adjusts the population to available territory — losses accounted for twenty-four per cent of all recent male deaths in three related groups he studied — as the ecologists would expect. The relative weakness of the kinship system would seem significant to Structuralists, who might argue that warfare was a result of a failure in reciprocity. The Structural Functionalists would see both the practice of warfare and the use of myth to sustain it as evidence that Yanomamö culture was a total adaptation to their environment. Ethologists would take ‘fierceness’ as proof of their point, that man has a violent drive that seeks discharge.

  Military historians would be interested above all by the externalities of Yanomamö combat. Taking as their starting-point the observable fact that people are fearful, and that fearfulness is enhanced by the deadliness of weapons, they would emphasise the carefully ritualised nature of Yanomamö armed encounter, and perhaps reverse Chagnon’s hierarchy. The ‘raids’ and ‘treacherous feasts’ that he sees as the acme of their warfare look in perspective more like murder, as known to societies regulated by codes of public law. Chest-pounding duels, club fights and spear fights, on the other hand, approximate to ritual conflict, regulated by an appreciation of how dangerous it is, first, to expose any but selected fighting men to injury; second, of how rapidly a fight may escalate into general violence if there is not a limitation on what weapons may be chosen — hence no use of sharpened clubs except by the challenger — or if deadly weapons, such as spears, are used at close range.

  The Yanomamö, in short, seem to have got intuitively to Clausewitz’s point and to have passed beyond it. Kinship groups might have embarked on a warfare of decisive battles designed to establish a hierarchy of ‘sover
eignties’ once and for all, had they so chosen. To have done so, however, would have been to risk annihilation, once their ‘real’, which is to say ritual, battles escalated into ‘true’ war. Preferring mutual prudence, they have settled for a routine of endemic fighting, much of it symbolic in character, which brings death to some but spares the majority to live, even if to fight another day.

  The Maring

  Of all discoveries about primitive societies made by ethnographers, that of ritual battle is of the greatest interest to military historians, if only because traces of it are so evidently present in what we know about ‘civilised’ war. Too often, however, the picture of ritual battle is over-generalised, implying a strength of ritual that reduces battle to a harmless game. Here is a description of primitive war, written by a bibliographer with a wide variety of sources in mind, but primarily based on the warfare of the mountain peoples of New Guinea: